was the mayor of Nis under Milosevic,
as well as a leader of the opposition
movement that eventually toppled the
regime. After Milosevic' s successor,
Zoran Djindjic, was assassinated, in
2003, Zivkovic became Prime Minister,
and put into action a plan called Opera-
tion Sabre, designed to decapitate the
Serbian Mafia and sever its connections
with the state. Nearly four thousand sus-
pects were charged with criminal activity,
and tens of thousands of weapons were
seized, along with hundreds of kilos of
explosives. I met with Zivkovic, who is
now a businessman, in his clean, modern
office, where botdes of wine from a vine-
yard that he owns were on display. He
wore a navy-blue blazer and had a bur-
nished complexion, looking less like a
politician than like a Mediterranean
yachtsman who had somehow got ma-
rooned in the middle of Serbia.
"By definition, organized crime is
connected with the state," Zivkovic said,
in a charmingly pedantic way. For years,
he said, criminal clans in Serbia had
their own police officers, lawyers, judges,
doctors, journalists, and financial advis-
ers. He spoke of a doctor in Belgrade: "If
somebody was to be eliminated from the
gang and survived the shoot-out, the
doctor's job was to give him a lethal in-
jection when he reaches the hospital."
Zivkovic readily admitted that few of the
people who were picked up in Operation
Sabre remained in prison. He told me
that obdurate forces within the Serbian
establishment "are determined to keep
Serbia in this Balkan state of isolation,
because this is the only Serbia that suits
h "
tern.
Other police sources in Nis provided
me with tantalizing new information
about the Panthers. I learned that Milan
Ljepoja, the Panther member who was
arrested in the Gex schoolyard, had re-
turned to Nis, his home town, after the
Dubai robbery, and spent some of his
money. He bought a number of adja-
cent shops in the city's historic district,
and converted the space into a night
club, which opened before his 2008 ar-
rest. He also became notorious in Nis
for hosting what one investigator de-
scribed as "orgies."
Police investigators in Nis also told me
about a friend of Ljepojàs, who used to
run a local cell-phone shop, in the Under-
ground shopping center. A few months
52 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 12, 2010
before the Dubai heist, the friend moved
to Dubai and opened a new cell-phone
shop. The Dubai police took notice of this
curious timing. Examining business rec-
ords, they determined that right after the
robbery large amounts of money began
flowing through the Serbian-owned shop.
According to the Nis investigators, the
ffiend is now in jail in Dubai.
T he police headquarters in Nis is at the
end of a tree-lined street where young
men promenade in an informal uniform
ofPorsche sunglasses, white T -shirts, and
black sweatpants. One such man had pro-
truding from his waistband the butt of a
Makarov pistol-the standard sidearm of
the countries of the former Soviet bloc-
but nobody seemed to mind.
When I visited, the police chief was
Zoran Stojanovic, who sat at his desk with
a stack of photos that he had prepared for
my visit. He had large, gnarled features
and wore a socialist gray suit. He initially
declined to talk to me about the Pink Pan-
thers. Instead, he delivered a lecture on the
destruction wrought by NATO's bombing
of the region, and on the suffering of the
Serbian people under the aggression of
Kosovo Albanians and others.
"Cluster bombs were thrown into the
center of the city," he said. "When we
look at the photos now, it is horrific." I
was handed an album of mortuary photo-
graphs. "Only if you have a strong stom-
ach should you look at this," he warned.
Bloody cadavers filled with shrapnel had
been stretched out before a camera. There
was a photograph of Zivorad and Vera
Ilic, an elderly couple, who died on May 7,
1999, from a cluster-bomb attack, which
mutilated their bodies. The tone in the
police chief's voice as he described these
tragedies was familiar to me from the
Bosnian war: the attention lavished on
Serbian victimhood is part of a doggedly
ethnocentric cosmology that is the prod-
uct of genuine suffering.
Coffee and orange juice were served.
"Throughou t all our tragedies, suffer-
ings, wars, in all our history, Serbia
never attacked anybody," the police
chief said. "We were defending our-
selves against the Ottoman Empire,
against the Austro- Hungarian Empire,
defending ourselves against Hitler's tyr-
anny, defending ourselves against the
separatist gangs in Kosovo."
Now that I had seen the photos and
listened to his lecture, he was happy to
talk about criminals in his city. But our
conversation would be short, he added,
because there were no criminals in Nis.
When I asked him about some young
men I had seen outside his police station,
holding the keys to new Audis, he told me
that they were entrepreneurs. "The sorts
of business that the young people you met
are dealing with include electronics, con-
sulting, and so on," he explained. I asked
him whether it was normal for entrepre-
neurs in Nis to carry Makarov pistols in
their sweatpants. He shook his head
amiably. "The guys with the sweatpants
and sunglasses are not in the electronics
business," he admitted, adding, "This
area is also very good for agricultural ac-
tivities." I asked him whether these activ-
ities included transporting heroin. He
frowned. "If you were here during sanc-
tions, you couldn't survive for five days,"
he said. "Let's just say that the people
who live here are very adaptable to
difficult conditions."
Stojanovic eventually allowed that
some citizens ofNis had gone to live in
Western Europe and worked as thieves.
They made new contacts in the under-
world and improved their material
standing. Some of these criminals re-
turned to Nis, where they attracted at-
tention by driving luxury cars and wear-
ing expensive clothing. "It is quite
possible that they got connected with
various people in the jewelry business
in Western Europe," he said. Though
these people may have broken laws in
the West, he said, in Nis they were sim-
ply spending money and enjoying them-
selves. In this way, they had become role
models for other young people. "We
have a saying," Stojanovic said. " 'Nice
and sweet, but short.' "
He thumbed through the police rec-
ords of men who had been identified as
Panthers by Interpol. "One of these bosses
that the West is so impressed by-when
he was here, he committed very petty Q
w
crimes," he said. "Car theft. Not even tak-
l/)
ing cars, but stealing things from inside
the car." I asked him ifhe was speaking of
Milan Ljepoja, and he nodded. "In Eu-
rope, he is considered a big boss," he said.
"Once he gets hold of a large amount of
money, he comes back to Nis to spend the Q
,
money and show of[ We can t do any-
thing, because he's not doing anything
illegal." He told me that Interpol sends